I have never been so grateful to see a Tesco bag in my life. There it was, flapping from the rear wiper of our hire car like a surrender flag, having survived the entire ferry crossing from Harwich and three hours of Dutch motorways. My partner had used it to mark which car was ours in the dark car park at Hook of Holland, and I had mocked him mercilessly for it. Now, pulling into the gravel drive of our holiday cottage in Oosterwolde, Friesland, it felt like the only familiar thing in a landscape so flat and green it seemed to go on forever.

The mishap, though. I should explain the mishap. In my enthusiasm to stretch my legs after the journey, I had flung open the car door with rather more gusto than the situation demanded. The door met the wooden fence post with a crack that echoed across the polder. Not a dent, thank goodness, but a sound sufficiently dramatic that a woman cycling past actually slowed down to assess whether intervention was required. I gave her a thumbs-up that I immediately regretted as perhaps too cheerful for someone who had just assaulted a fence. She cycled on, presumably to tell her family about the English hooligans loose in the neighbourhood.

The cottage itself was one of those traditional Frisian places with a steep roof and windows that seemed to wink at you in the afternoon light. Inside, everything smelled of pine and the particular stillness of a house that has been waiting patiently for occupants. I made the obligatory cup of tea using a kettle that boiled with theatrical slowness, then settled onto the small terrace with my book, determined to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.

That first afternoon set the pattern for the week. The sun, which I had worried might be a fickle presence in this northern reach of the Netherlands, proved almost embarrassingly reliable. I would wake without alarm, make coffee in the compact kitchen, and then simply exist on that terrace with my novel and a packet of stroopwafels I had optimistically purchased at a service station. The garden backed onto a narrow waterway where the occasional boat passed at a pace that suggested the pilot had nowhere particular to be either. We nodded at each other, these boat people and I, fellow conspirators in the art of unhurriedness.

On the second day, we ventured perhaps two miles to a small village whose name I immediately forgot and whose entire commercial centre appeared to consist of a bakery and a bicycle repair shop. I bought a loaf of bread still warm from the oven and ate half of it walking back along the canal path, feeling pleasantly feral. A heron watched me from the opposite bank with the judgmental expression herons have perfected across millennia.

The gentle exploration became our rhythm. A morning cycle to a nearby lake where Dutch families gathered with elaborate picnics and inflatable boats. An afternoon wandering the modest centre of Oosterwolde itself, where the supermarket provided genuine entertainment simply through the novelty of unfamiliar packaging. I became genuinely excited by the cheese selection in a way that would have embarrassed my younger self, rushing through cities with a checklist of sights to conquer.

There is something humbling about discovering how little you actually need to be content. I had packed three books, ambitiously, and finished two of them simply by allowing myself the radical luxury of sitting still. My phone stayed largely in my bag, its notifications accumulating unread, and I found I did not miss the constant low-grade anxiety of connectivity. The world of urgent emails and rolling news felt as distant and irrelevant as that Tesco bag now seemed, flapping on a wiper in another life.

By the final morning, I had developed what I can only describe as a territorial attachment to my terrace chair. I understood its slight wobble, the way the afternoon sun moved across its wooden slats, the precise angle at which to hold my book to avoid glare. These small domestications of a temporary space felt more genuinely restorative than any number of photographed landmarks. We packed the car with the same incompetence with which we had unpacked, and I paused to give the fence post an apologetic pat. It had, after all, been the first witness to a holiday that taught me the quiet triumph of doing very little, very slowly, in very good light.